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An Enduring Love
Tribune photo by ANDY JONES
William Bissi admires a bronze sculpture of his deseased wife Dorothy and himself created by artist Tamara Gerkin.
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Published: May 13, 2008
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TRINITY - On a windswept meadow on a warm Sunday morning blessed, in countless ways, with unlimited visibility, a bright-eyed fellow born not long after the dawning of the previous century played the expectant witness as his hired artist worked at a troublesome knot.
William Bissi has lived long and come far since joining the human struggle in Chicago in 1915, a momentous year that began with a cook - the infamous "Typhoid Mary" - infecting 25 people in a New York Hospital and ended with warriors from Great Britain and Germany emerging from their trenches for a Christmas Day truce that included soccer, toasts and carol singing.
Ninety-two years later, almost nothing judged by history to have had significance in 1915 - with the possible exception of Albert Einstein publishing the general theory of relativity - continues to reverberate. But here was Bissi, in a professor's unruly gray beard and a well-pressed navy pinstripe suit, surrounded by meaningful ripples: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
His children, his children's children, and their children's children. All of which began, if not precisely in 1915, then certainly in 1942, when Bissi spied the next best thing to screen siren Jennifer Jones at a picnic for employees of the Social Security Administration in Washington, D.C. Dorothy Jones, just then 21 from the knobby hills of northeast Nebraska. What attracted him? Says the old gent demurely, "It was her personality."
Right. Just like Claudette Colbert's "personality" drove Clark Gable crazy in "It Happened One Night." Whatever. When the brunette from whom he couldn't detach his eyes stood to leave and called to a girlfriend, "See you at 8:30!" Bissi plunged in without hesitation: "I'll be there." And he was. The events that would spawn three daughters and a son, plus several lifetimes' worth of joy had been set in motion.
An Artist's Rendering
About a year later, in a modest house in a northeast Nebraska town bisected by the Lewis and Clark trail, Dorothy's mother tossed the telegram that arrived from Austin, Texas, on the kitchen table. "I knew she was going to marry him," she huffed. "I knew it as soon as I saw those pictures."
Overhearing this, Donna, the bride's baby sister, fairly swooned. William Bissi - Bill - had matinee idol features to go along with smarts, patience and an easy laugh. And, of course by now he was an Army man, a corporal in uniform.
They came to meet the family and she had recovered from swooning all over again, Donna, accompanied by her posse of girls from the fourth grade, scrabbled up apple trees to get a peek through the bedroom window. "They were kissing!" the baby sister, now Donna Mazure, of Skokie, Ill., says. "I think they knew we were watching."
Now the stubborn tangle has relented, and now the shroud is falling away. And now, with shining eyes that belong in a summer sky, William Bissi gazes back across the decades. After months of painstaking labor and sucker punches of self-doubt, Tamara Gerkin has revealed a moment that comes as close as human hands and cast bronze ever can hope to approach capturing a deathless love.
Devotion Beyond The Horizon
This is what Bissi, assorted descendants, in-laws and family friends had come to see - not just a statue, but an iconic representation of what they had experienced and witnessed in the thrall of a living, breathing marriage that stretched six months shy of 65 years, interrupted only by Dorothy's death in June.
Dorothy - Dot, actually - danced and sang and did impersonations of comediennes - Zasu Pitts and Martha Raye. Bill was a consummate speaker, a natural public relations man. He could do 40 minutes on just about anything and never touch a note.
But it was at home where they thrived. Ten years married, they were thinking of adopting when Dot became pregnant. Deborah arrived in 1953. Eighteen months later, Rebecca and Roberta - nearly 14 pounds worth of twins - arrived. And just as they'd gotten them off to kindergarten, here came Douglas.
Donna, who married a Chicago Bill of her own, liked the pattern so well she duplicated it precisely. "I'd call that a copycat," Dot's Bill says, unsheathing an old family needle.
In each of their stops before they settled, grown children out of the house, in New Port Richey 24 years ago, the Bissis set up the go-to house, the place their children's friends came to hang out. Bill Bissi shrugs. "We had the pool, the ping-pong table, the bicycles."
They also had the example of what family life could be, should be. Kids notice. So should we.
A sculpture the artist named "Eternal Love" - life-size figures in a tender, protective back-to-front embrace - rises on polished Georgia granite near the heart of Trinity Memorial Gardens. It will stand for generations, an unchanging tribute to an unchanging devotion whose rewards extend beyond our ability to see or imagine.
Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.
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